Alaskan_Son

I made this video a while back and realized afterward that I could have used a quicker method by group selecting the polyline solids and completing the polyline subtraction for each window and door in a single step, but it might help some of you. I personally still like the added panels to the surface method. Doesn't seem all that difficult or time consuming to me. It just requires a little more cleanup than the material region method does if you decided to make any changes to the walls, doors, windows, etc...

Thank you Alan, that is very kind of you.

One additional idea to add to this: You can also consider using multiple walls side by side in order to avoid cutting through the substrate layers. Something like this... -Wall #1 might have interior finish layers, framing layer, exterior sheathing, and building wrap -Wall #2 might have a black or exterior finish colored "shadow line" material for the main layer followed by your exterior finish layer(s). -Your material region "grooves" would be applied to Wall #2 and again...the material regions would go onto their own layer and simply be turned off. This way your details and model will be a lot more accurate. Quick sample plan just to give you a very rough idea... Groove 2.plan

Sorry Johnny...I have no answer for you.. Please make sure that gets reported though. I would just keep trying different settings to maybe narrow it down a bit. Maybe try not saving image to file?

Its working fine Johnny, its just that your upper walls have a much thinner group of exterior layers. Make the material region thinner for the upper floor walls and you should be good to go.

Okay, so I played with this a bit for you. First things first...A couple quick notes: 1. You need to use a wall material region, it must be drawn on the wall in an elevation view, and it must be set to Cut Finish Layers Of Parent Object. Looks like maybe you're using a floor material region (drawn in plan view). 2. Forget what i said about using Opening (no material). Not sure what I was thinking, there's really no benefit to that option. I would usually just use panels applied to the surface for this sort of thing so I hadn't really explored the methods I mentioned above until now. It actually works pretty well except for a few things... A. There seems to be a handful of bugs associated with material regions that make converting the polyline grid work less than efficient and so its a little more time consuming than what I thought it would be. There also seem to be a handful of small bugs associated with material regions in general that make the method pretty tedious. Because of that I'm thinking panels applied to the surface might be just as fast. B. Glenn is correct that the corners are somewhat of an issue. I didn't think they would be because all we're doing is cutting the finish away however I hadn't accounted for the layers we're using to actually cut those finish layers. C. The material region will cut through ALL your finish layers (some of which we would want to leave in place in the real world). So, here are my conclusions... The method I described should really only be used for show and will not be entirely accurate. If you want accuracy you can set the material region to account for the finish layers that will be remaining but then you have the issues at the corners. So, if you don't want to apply panels to the surface I would personally just apply the material regions (any materials at all actually) and use the last of those 3 methods I mentioned above...put them on a unique layer and just turn the layer off. If you go this route you'll probably want to add a zero (or very thin) thickness color to your walls main layers so your framing isn't exposed. Here's a very quick sample plan... Groove plan.plan

Actually, after giving it a little thought, I think the method I mentioned above is actually quite a bit faster than creating panels. You could very easily create a grid work out of standard strip shaped polylines, group select them, polyline union, and convert to material region. A lot of possibility.

Not sure whether its faster than just creating panels on the surface or not, but you can use a material region, set it to cut surface and (depending on the situation) either: A. Make it thinner than the wall finish and use a dark color to create a shadow line B. Use Opening (no material) for the material. C. Put it on a unique layer and turn the layer off Hopefully that helps get you headed in the right direction.

Hey Sean, I would probably draw an extra little section of perpendicular wall at that location. Here's another quick crappy video for you...the second in my Quick Crappy Videos For Sean series : )

Actually, in this particular instance you dont even need the room divider wall. This is one of those cases where simply drawing in the correct order/sequence will address the issue. Here's a quick crappy video...

Not really... Isolating layers in some circumstances, drawing temporary CAD, and very slow/precise mouse movement. Other than that, I think WYSIWYG.

I have a suggestion here. I have the problem as well but it doesn't happen anywhere near as short as 60 seconds. I suspect it might be an issue with your router...either a bandwidth issue or just time for a new one. It just seems like intermittent connectivity might cause the problem. I actually suspect that might be the problem on my end as well.

I've spent a fair amount of time exploring the technique and although I can't answer for Yusef, I can tell you that it doesn't really matter what you use as a moulding because the snaps only recognize the line itself, so I would just make the moulding as small as possible. The moldings themselves aren't really a necessity other than the fact you need to have them in order to see the line. This is one reason using solids, additional faces, or zero thickness polyline solids have some benefits...there is no molding profile to contend with (albeit mostly just a minor visual annoyance). That being said, using a 3D molding polyline has 2 benefits in that: A. You can easily see the wire frame (which you can also sort of do by using the other items I mentioned in glass house mode)... But more importantly... B. The wire frame can be very easily manipulated and reshaped along all axis (i.e. you can very easily and independently move all its points freely through 3D space).

Yusef, I'm not sure when exactly I might use that technique, but you sir are a friggin' genius. The sound quality on your video stinks (actually couldn't really hear it at all), but that's okay, your method is absolutely fantastic!! I played around with it a bit and one thing I might add to the technique myself... It looks like you were using molding polylines. I might prefer to use additional faces, solids, or zero thickness polyline solids in a lot of situations (all of which snap quite nicely)...probably in conjunction with the glass house rendering technique. Anyway, thank you Yusef. That has to be my favorite tip in a very long time and I'm sure I'll probably be making use of it at some point. Way to go my friend : )

You betcha!

I think the answer to that question really depends on specifically what you're trying to accomplish. There are a few methods including using perpendicular/parallel walls as necessary, using alternating wall types, using a specific drawing order, using a specific series of operations, using no room definition walls (either permanently or temporarily), or even temporarily using an additional floor along with the reference display...I'm sure the list could go on. Can you elaborate a bit?

Edit>Default Settings>Plan>Snap Grid / Snap Units

Just to clarify here... -As I suggested and as Richard spelled out in a little more detail, you can adjust the floor structure settings via Edit>Default Settings>Floor>Floor Structure. Doing this you will adjust the floor defaults for whichever floor you are on when you open the Default Settings dbx. -As Joe suggested you can also reach the exact same Floor Structure dbx. by going through the framing defaults. This has the benefit of allowing you to adjust those settings for multiple floors without having to switch floors and open up defaults again. -The above 2 methods only adjust the "defaults" on a floor by floor basis. In order to adjust the ACTUAL floor structure defaults plan wide though you need to do so via Edit>Default Settings>Rooms>Normal Room>Floor Structure tab. This way you can actually check that little Default box if you want to.

Floor defaults, structure tab.

They should be able to export a DWG, a 3D DWG, 3DS, etc. The bigger problem though is material definitions. You would probably need to run it through a separate program (like Sketchup maybe) in order to assign materials to the various surfaces.

There you go. Using rood planes is probably the easiest method. Great idea Val!

Angela, Maybe this thread will help you a bit... https://chieftalk.chiefarchitect.com/index.php?/topic/9789-video-request-elevation-dimensioning/?hl=%2Belevation+%2Bpoint+%2Bpoint#entry85433 Unfortunately, story pole dimensions aren't going to help you when it comes to any horizontal dimensions such as the overhang you mentioned (at least that's what it sounds like you're talking about), and I really doubt it has anything to do with your dimension settings. I for one won't sugar coat it...there are simply a lot of things that don't dimension very well in elevation views and I find myself resorting to point to point dimensions quite a bit for elevation views. BTW, you don't actually need to use the auto story pole dimension tool for story pole dimensions either. You can dimension all those items using standard dimension tools as well.

Yep. This is what I would do as well. Could be done in just a couple minutes. I originally answered that a molding polyline was probably the easiest but deleted my answer almost immediately once I realized the shape wasn't the same on all sides.

Only way I know of would be to use a normal full camera view and create a series of ray traces one at a time as you manually walk the camera through. Then, once they're complete just piece the photos together with a video editing program like Windows Movie Maker...which although not automatically downloaded with Windows anymore can still be downloaded from Microsoft for free. I think a 3rd party program is probably a better solution though and doubt that will change anytime soon for Chief...or most any other architectural design program for that matter.

Aww man!! C'mon...that was funny. Aboooooot. Hahahaha :-/ Oh well...I liked it.